>>>> expecting the car to plug itself into a wall outlet / cable is asking a
>>>> bit much.
>
>>> I can easily imagine a robot arm that can reach out, find and connect to
>>> some
>>> contacts mounted somehow on the front license plate area.
>
>> That's a lot of moving parts to break, especially considering how many people
>> have trouble not running over things in the garage already. Plus the hazard
>> of people or pets or other things getting caught up in the mechanism.
>
> This strikes me as a non-problem that keeps getting elevated into something
> much bigger and more complicated than it needs to be.
I think you're right. What's exciting to me is that two technological advances
are starting to mature at the same time, and that the two of the together will
potentially be much more significant than either would be separately.
ICE and EV cars are both equally well suited to autonomous driving, but EV cars
are _much_ better suited to autonomous recharging than ICE cars are to
autonomous refueling.
At-home EV recharging is already more than plenty good enough for all but the
idle super-rich. At-home charging isn't merely a solved problem; it never
really was a problem in the first place.
On-the-go EV recharging is only a problem when the miles driven in a day are
greater than the miles the car gets on an overnight charge. Save for road
trips, the Tesla is already there and others will soon follow as battery prices
continue to drop. And plugin hybrids such as the Volt and my Mustang project
also have that problem "well enough" solved; if most people only filled up
their gas tanks a few times a year rather than a few times a month, many (but
not all) of our fossil fuel problems would magically go away.
What EVs do at this time when many new cars can already drive themselves in
limited ways is open up the possibility for fleets of fully autonomous nearly
maintenance-free magic carpets. _That's_ the exciting bit. How they wind up
charging themselves isn't something anybody other than the mass market
manufacturers really need to worry about.
b&
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